IVF for SHE.E.O’s - last chance saloon.

Caravans in Crystal Palace & swarms of potential ‘mums to be’  trooping around Harley street! You couldn’t make this up!

This is #2 article I have written about my IVF journey. In the last piece I ended with a video of my ‘trigger injection’ for all to see, hoping my 6 years journey might have taken a turn for the better! The trigger injection always meant that I would have ‘some eggs’ which could then be turned into embryos, however after that video the trigger injection didn’t even give me one egg. I’m not sure what’s worse, creating embryos and then not getting pregnant or having a miscarriage (both of which I have experienced many many times) or, not even getting any eggs to have the chance to try anything.

After this heartbreak I was unsure whether I could cope  with more hormonal rollercoasters (my poor husband). After doing some research, we looked into the best clinics in the UK. These are all on Harley Street in London. Looking back I can’t believe we didn’t look into this before, we just presumed all IVF clinics were similar. They take the egg they take the embryo and Abracadabra you get pregnant (if you’re lucky). This clearly wasn’t the case.

In April 2024 I started my ‘final go!’ at IVF. I moved up to London for 3 weeks of intense treatments: Blood tests every day to determine the does of drugs needs to be injected each day. You couldn’t even go back to where you were staying (a caravan in crystal palace.., my crazy idea to save money as I was paying so much for IVF – who said I was tight!!!)

Many days I was working in a ‘Joe and the Juice’ – after my morning blood test, music pumping, and me running my company from this lively coffee shop! I would then get a call saying my blood tests had come in, and I need to administer the days drugs, the exact amount to make sure my eggs grew to the right size! Often I would then go into the toilets (which felt like I had some kind of intravenous drug issue) and then do my injections!!

Each morning I walked for 10k steps to the Harley Street clinic and then me, along with about 50 IVF mums on the same journey would go from one Big Blue door on Harley street, round the corner to another to get our bloods tests and then scatter down Marylebone high street to work in various coffee shops. It felt like a daily migration of ‘hopeful’ mums..  it was so surreal to be on this journey with all these other mums. Some spoke in the waiting room and some didn’t.  All on their own path which had lead to ARGC clinic. The clinic had twice the success rate to any others in the UK, which was amazing seeing as most people went their after many many failed attempts at other clinics.

Before even starting the process with them I did various tests and spent over £10k on injections to bring down my levels of inflammation, then drip after drip (@£1000 a pop) to bring it down further. All experimental stuff that other clinics didn’t do… but this was my last time, so I was ‘going for it’.

I remember saying to Andrew, a sales director who worked for my company, ‘I am spending so much money’, and he said ‘what else would you rather spend it on, nothing will mean more to you than this!’ – and that really sat with me, it made the thought of haemorrhaging money seem much less of an issue – it’s true, what would I have spent it on, a new bathroom, some nice holidays?? All pointless crap really. Nothing quite as good as a whole baby human!

After weeks in London we got the eggs we needed and fertilised 3! So far, so good! Because of my age they said they would put all three in! …

Now we wait…. I must have bought 100 pregnancy tests In the next month, shining a torch at the little screen ‘is there a line’ ‘can I see one’!! AND YES.. we got a line!!! I have been successful to this stage so many times before, I was happy to be here, but knew that it didn’t mean I would end up staying pregnant.

As the days weeks went on my husband and I went for private scans each Wednesday – we wouldn’t feel safe until 13 weeks! 13 weeks came, and now our ‘safe zone’ was 20 weeks!! Gradually as we got over 20 weeks things became real… and the sickness became real!!

I was now pregnant, very very sick, but most importantly pregnant!

Now… I knew the next challenge was setting up my company so that being off on maternity for few months at least would be possible. I knew I had set things up so that I could step back.. but now this was becoming reality!

We went for a full on gender reveal huge party. We own martial arts schools so we had a blue and a pink fighter at our party who fought to reveal the winner…. !!

The rest is history! We now have our amazing son and its better than I can have ever imagined! ..

My next blog talks about maternity leave whilst running a business and how it had changed my view of my position in the company… and the realisation of how to evolve!